What is Digg?153 Comments
- inactive, on 10/24/2007, -16/+163* containing "Digg" or * containing "Kevin Rose" = Frontpage
That picture of him on businessweek makes him look really stupid. - mercurysquad, on 10/12/2007, -7/+111Site like digg in 10 hours: maybe yes if you have EVERYTHING planned beforehand, the server running already, and only count actual coding time excluding testing time. But MySpace like site in 3-4 hours: that's just one big understatement.
- gregs2500, on 10/12/2007, -26/+92Well, he is our creator and overlord. I, for one, wouldn't say anything bad about him. (Please don't smite me Kevin Rose!)
- GTPilot, on 10/12/2007, -1/+653-4 hours to re-create myspace? .. i'll hire ya.. we need a super hero who can design and develop a couple entire web apps per day.
- surfing, on 10/12/2007, -1/+52Thanks for adding the new "Digg" section:
http://i28.photobucket.com/albums/c240/becda289/digg.jpg - TonyCubed, on 10/12/2007, -4/+37Digg didn't become famous within 5 hours..
- r2700, on 10/12/2007, -2/+31Anyone want to collaborate on creating a new MySpace to see if we can do it in a day or two? You know it'd constantly be on the Digg homepage b/c it was conceived here..
- tribality, on 10/12/2007, -0/+26MySpace is a giant mess, but has lots of hours put into it. Hell, tons of people have spent 4 hours just making their own MySpace pages.
- jayadelson, on 10/12/2007, -1/+22Kevin did use eLance to find Owen Byrne...confirmed. What we spent on him, however, has far exceeded $200 over the years, as Owen will tell his grandchildren and heirs to the Owen Byrne Foundation. ;)
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+20Digg will probably be sold for 200 dollars after the Web 2.0 bubble bursts.
The problem with digg is that Google's text ads simply don't work here. Half the users are running firefox with adblock and don't even see them, and the rest of the crowd have been on the internet long enough to "tune out" the ads and not even look at them.
A site like digg, getting 20 million unique visitors per month, should be making 20 or 30 million dollars a year in adsense profits. Yet Kevin himself admitted they only made 3 million last year, which wasn't even enough to cover their server farm, office rent, and employee payroll.
Google's ads depend on stupid people who can't distinguish text ads from actual content links on a website. Digg users simply aren't stupid enough for adsense to work here. - Jaymoon, on 10/12/2007, -1/+20@shyguy01
Don't forget, you can always use the plain version of duggmirror....
http://duggmirror.com/programming/Digg_com_created_for_only_200_00/plain.html
For those sites that are CSS/JS heavy... - inactive, on 10/24/2007, -36/+55It's easy i think to go back and rebuild history. Almost everyone here knows that making php (or asp) script to produce what digg does, is really not tough at all. Most programmers here can do it in less than 10 hours from all the functionality i can see. It is ultimately the idea that counts, and not really the time it took to make it.
A site like myspace.com can be put together in 3-4 hours too. Ditto for del.icio.us and a lot of the other high priced ones.
So, the value is in the idea, and not necessarily in the time it takes to execute it. - Mootabolife, on 10/12/2007, -12/+28$200? Did they count the associated mountain dew tax?
- phej, on 10/12/2007, -1/+17"Kevin Rose, founder of Digg.com, presented at The Future of Web Apps Summit in San Francisco last month, giving a demo and sharing the story behind Digg's launch.
In 2003, Kevin had a big idea. He came to Elance to post a project and look for a PHP programmer, selected Owen Byrne (Elance username: permafrost) and worked with him to build the initial product. Eventually, Owen joined Digg full-time.
Today, Digg is one of the most successful and visited websites, Owen Byrne is Digg's Senior Software Engineer, and Kevin is a high flyer recently featured on the cover of BusinessWeek." - Zzyw, on 10/12/2007, -2/+16"It was one of these things, where..."
- paulmdx, on 10/12/2007, -5/+18What mercurysquad said. Sites like MySpace may seem easy but from my experience there's a lot more considerations than there first seems.
- cjmal, on 10/12/2007, -0/+13Maybe the only had $200 saved up at the time?
- deltahat02, on 10/12/2007, -0/+12I'm glad to see the programmer got to come on board full time. It would truly blow to build digg for $200 and watch someone else run away with the fat stacks of cash.
- solarpowered, on 10/12/2007, -0/+12This information is hardly a ringing endorsement of what you can earn using ELance.
- Comatose51, on 10/12/2007, -0/+12I think that's a common, basic misconception. Everyone has ideas. The devil is in the details. Is Friendster, Facebook, and MySpace all that different in concept? No. They're slightly different in many ways. Friendster even had an advantage in being one of the first but ultimately failed. Somehow, we've been taught that inventions and innovations are heroic deeds, a monumental idea by a single genius. Those do exist but are very, very rare, especially this day and age when technology is so complex. Nobels are often awarded to more than one person for the same discovery. We have research teams and labs. For an idea to become more than just that you need a team of people who are skilled in various aspects of implementation. This is why I question the role and relative worth of CEOs (check out "Fooled by Randomness").
I think some of people who dream of starting the next Google or next Digg are making this basic mistake. You don't need some crazy good idea. You need to do something almost trivial but do it very well. Then you can build on top of that. Look at Unix/Linux, Google, or Digg. - keylime314159, on 10/12/2007, -0/+12It's not the idea that counts; there are a lot of ideas out there.
It's not the difficulty of development that counts; many "valuable" sites would not be hard to replicate.
It is the luck, marketing, and personal connections that are behind creating a "valuable" site that count. - r2700, on 10/12/2007, -3/+15Ok, let's do it. I grabbed DuggSpace.com (please don't kill me, Digg, that's not the final name and I promise not to make any money off of it while it's being used as a placeholder). I've created a Digg submission for it. Let's see what happens.
http://digg.com/programming/Can_Digg_Users_Create_the_Next_MySpace - willis77, on 10/12/2007, -2/+13Hindsight is 20/20, my friends.
- shyguy01, on 10/12/2007, -4/+14Original down / very slow
Duggmirror sort of works for me: http://duggmirror.com/programming/Digg_com_created_for_only_200_00/ - asdfrewq, on 10/12/2007, -1/+11No, but digg is the sort of site where stories of the origins of sites such as google and yahoo would be (and are) featured. It's only makes sense the the users are interested in the origins of digg itself.
- RyanOC, on 10/12/2007, -1/+11It realy helped that he had techtv to promote the site all the tiome too. When I first herd him takling about it it was likd he was talking about some cool site he found, not one he created. Free advertisement helps a lot
- JavertHolmes, on 10/12/2007, -2/+12"I remember when there was no service like this available on the Internet..."
Kuro5hin ( http://www.kuro5hin.org/ ), pretty much the exact same concept as Digg as far as users voting up other submissions and commetning on them, has been around for approximately 5 years. - sputnike, on 10/12/2007, -1/+9We shall call it Diggspace (or digspace due to tm issues mind you apple does it and they dont care) and if your not a member of digg, your not allowed in - it's our cooler, more of a treehouse club version of myspace and it will be better than myspace :)
- greatclare, on 10/12/2007, -3/+10A better MySpace made by diggers can happen. It MUST happen! MySpace is the worst place on the internet, I'm sure a couple of diggers with a couple hours can make a better MySpace.
- covertbadger, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6Er, since about 20 years ago when it became less than a day's wages for most professional workers.
- mouthster, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6Yeah that's the only thing I could think about reading this headline description.. coding for 10 dollars an hour!? I sure hope Owen got a raise!
- digitalArtform, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Digg is neat and all, but isn't it just a somewhat tweaked Fark for News?
- rodrigo74, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6knightblade: and then when someone show a story about a poor guy who worked on a fixed price and ended up earning 2000 dollars for 6 months of hard work, you would say "A terrific example of why you work by the hour and not by the project", right?
Working by the hour is much safer, considering that none of us can view the future. Sure, it could have been a bad deal in this specific case (not sure though, since the guy ended up working full time at digg and is the big boss of the development team now) but you're during an a-posteriori analysis, no one makes mistakes when it's about stuff that already happened, right? - radicaldementia, on 10/12/2007, -2/+7make a website in 10 hours? Yeah it could be done, but you'd probably end up with a horribly written and unmaintainable site. If you want to make a well-written and organized site, it usually takes some time. It's often the case in software engineering where you begin building your system, and then at some point you completely start over, but this time you have a much better idea of how to do things, so you end up with better quality code.
- jazbek, on 10/12/2007, -2/+7@ knightblade2oo4
Actually, I've been coding heavily for the past 4 months on a project that I'm getting a flat rate of $8000 for, and I've had to hire people to help me because the project has run way over time estimation. I'm estimating by the end of it I'm going to average about $15/hour instead of my normal $75. I wish I could just "quit", but it'd be completely unprofessional. And guess, what there's this little thing called a "contract". Working by the hour is definitely much safer than working by a flat rate, at least you know what you'll be getting paid for your time. - graemee, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Actually I find the slashdot has benefited from digg as a filter for good stories.
- doushanes, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4his full presentation
http://img669.libsyn.com/img669/1aba4b31654896ab62b6c07546622fa7/45b27180/7751/5032/Kevin_Rose.mp3 - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Of course, anyone here is welcome to collaborate on creating the next billion-dollar web space. Nothing stopping the people here from creating some more magic. If anything, this article proves that if an idea is executed and marketed correctly, you don't need millions of dollars to start. I am not filthy rich yet, but 6 years ago i quit my job one day in a sudden wave of a brainstorm, and thankfully to that small idea i can make about 1.5 million per year now. This is not some bragging point, except that yes i also started with a few hundred dollars and parlayed that into a million-dollar property in a short time. Bigger ideas of course go on to make hundreds of millions. So yeah, who wants to collaborate on the next big thing?
By the way, there really is a super idea about the next Myspace.com out there (and it is being done by the person who sold myspace to Rupert Murdoch). We can beat him to the punch, can't we? - sark666, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Kicking myself in the head.
I don't want to sound like someone going "I thought of this!'
But...
Way back when, when I first started going to /. I submitted a story and it got rejected. It somewhat frustrated me that one user decided if my story was good enough or not. I pondered a moment and thought, 'hmm... there should be a way to let the users decide whats news worthy or not'. Which is basically digg. I thought about it a moment, and I thought neat idea but just let it go and never thought of it again, that is until I saw digg.
Oh well live and regret. :) - blackjack75, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4No he just moved to India.
- Beelzebub, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4who?
- andrewry, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3He bought it, and if my memory is correct, for $1,000+.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3I have never seen that show, but of course if someone is capable of putting up a site name in front of even 5000 people and they can buy into the idea, from then on it is a viral effect for many sites. A site could have cost $10 to make and still will get users if the "cool" factor can be pitched in front of a captive audience. I don't really buy into this "oh this idea was so cool and new and it took only $200 to make.. i'm a genius".
It's the "buzz factor" that thousands of sites cannot generate. - tribality, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Here is a quote from way back then...
"I wrote a scoping document to a friend, who is a developer. The friend said it would take two or three weeks to create and cost 700 bucks, so I said, 'Let's go for it.'" - Kevin Rose
from http://quotiki.com/quote.aspx?id=6526 - joaob, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3It's funny everyone seems to pass right by this not realizing that their messiah lied to them.
- Hootyea, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I remember the 5 hours between Al Gore blessing us with the Internet, and then having Crysis made in Shockwave.
- skell, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2OBKenob:
Why not ask yourself? feedback@digg.com
Kind of ironic that you talk about comment abuse, when you *should* know that requesting features in the comments isn't the right way to go about it. ;] - Soldan, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3and then Digg expanded beyond tech and the royal tard fest ensued
you sheep will digg anything.. - OBKenobi, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2The page loading isn't nearly as slow as Digg itself is slow. Sometimes it takes 20 seconds for Digg to respond, let alone load a page. I start browsing other pages waiting for it to update.
- LegendarySock, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2It was originally owned by Digg Records... Check the way back machine.
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